John Krasinski Says A Quiet Place 2 May Focus on Other Survivors [Updated]

A Quiet Place director John Krasinski says that the surprise smash hit's upcoming sequel may focus on different survivors of the alien apocalypse. When it comes to potential for return on investment, horror may well be the most reliable genre in Hollywood. While it's very rare for a fright flick to be one of the top-grossing movies of the year - outside of major anomalies like IT - most horror films don't cost very much to make by studio standards, and can easily earn back their budgets many times over.

That was definitely the case for A Quiet Place, one of the biggest sleeper hits of the year so far. Coming off lots of positive buzz from festival screenings, A Quiet Place - directed, starring, and co-written by John Krasinski - earned both heavy critical acclaim and extremely positive reactions from audiences upon its wide release in early April. Still hanging around in the box office top 5, A Quiet Place took #1 on non-consecutive weekends, and has hauled in over $255 million worldwide on a budget of only $17 million. Naturally, a sequel has already been commissioned.

While official plot details are probably a long way off from surfacing - after all, the sequel is still being developed - Krasinski himself recently told Deadline about an idea he has for what A Quiet Place 2 could explore, and it involves shifting the focus onto other apocalypse survivors that aren't members of the family viewers spent the original film fearing for. Here's his full quote:

The thing that I loved in the movie, where my mind kept wandering as we were making it, was the question of who was on the other end of those fires, when the father lights the fire and in the distance those other fires light up. How did those people survive? How did that old man survive?

In the extreme these characters are going through, there’s no room to think about that. They’re there, there’s an old man who’s about to scream, they just have to deal with that. I think it would be interesting to see what’s going on elsewhere at this same time.

As Krasinski - who it's worth noting, is not yet confirmed to direct the sequel - mentions, A Quiet Place featured a scene in which dad Lee lit a fire, which was followed by other fires lighting up in the distance. A logical assumption to make is that the other fires are lit by other family or survivor group leaders not too far away, and that Lee has some type of communication and/or coordination with these other survivors on occasion. Outside of the film's opening flashback scene, the viewer is given only a brief glimpse into Lee's family's life before things go south.

The old man - who essentially commits suicide by screaming in grief over his wife's death - that Lee and his son Marcus briefly run across could very well be part of this makeshift survivor community, as it's never really explained if Lee had met the man before, or if they had a preexisting relationship. As Krasinski says above, there was "no room to think about that" in the moment. While A Quiet Place 2 shining a spotlight on new survivors makes a lot of sense from a world-building standpoint, one wonders though if audiences will be receptive to the idea of not continuing the story of Lee's wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and their remaining children.